Robert A. Heinlein
Heinlein signing autographs at the 1976 Worldcon
Born	(1907-07-07)July 7, 1907 Butler, Missouri, United States
Died	May 8, 1988(1988-05-08) (aged 80) Carmel, California, United States
Pen name	Anson MacDonald, Lyle Monroe, John Riverside, Caleb Saunders, Simon York
Occupation	Novelist, short story author, essayist, screenwriter
Genres	Science fiction, Fantasy
Influences H. G. Wells, James Branch Cabell, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain
Influenced Allen Steele, Spider Robinson, George R. R. Martin, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Tom Clancy, James Wesley Rawles, John Varley, Neil Gaiman

Robert Anson Heinlein ( /ˈhaɪnlaɪn/ HYN-lyn)^[1][2][3] (July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers,"^[4] he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre in his time. He set a standard for scientific and engineering plausibility, and helped to raise the genre's standards of literary quality.

He was one of the first science fiction writers to break into mainstream magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s. He was one of the best-selling science fiction novelists for many decades. He, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke are known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.^[5][6]

Heinlein, a notable writer of science fiction short stories, was one of a group of writers who came to prominence under the editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr. in his Astounding Science Fiction magazine—though Heinlein denied that Campbell influenced his writing to any great degree.

Within the framework of his science fiction stories, Heinlein repeatedly addressed certain social themes: the importance of individual liberty and self-reliance, the obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government, and the tendency of society to repress nonconformist thought. He also examined the relationship between physical and emotional love, explored various unorthodox family structures, and speculated on the influence of space travel on human cultural practices. His approach to these themes led to wildly divergent opinions on what views were being expounded via his fiction.

Heinlein won Hugo Awards for four of his novels; in addition, fifty years after publication, three of his works were awarded "Retro Hugos"—awards given retrospectively for years in which Hugo Awards had not been awarded. He also won the first Grand Master Award, given by the Science Fiction Writers of America, for his lifetime achievement. In his fiction Heinlein coined words that have become part of the English language, including "grok" and "waldo", and popularized the term "TANSTAAFL".

Life[link]

Midshipman Heinlein, from the 1929 U.S. Naval Academy yearbook

Birth and childhood[link]

Heinlein was born on July 7, 1907, to Rex Ivar Heinlein (an accountant) and Bam Lyle Heinlein, in Butler, Missouri. His childhood was spent in Kansas City, Missouri.^[7] The outlook and values of this time and place (in his own words, "The Bible Belt") had a definite influence on his fiction, especially his later works, as he drew heavily upon his childhood in establishing the setting and cultural atmosphere in works like Time Enough for Love and To Sail Beyond the Sunset. He often broke with many of the Bible Belt's values and mores — especially in regard to religion and sexual morality — both in his writing and in his personal life.^{[citation needed]}

Navy[link]

Heinlein's experience in the military exerted a strong influence on his character and writing. Heinlein graduated from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis in 1929, and served as an officer in the United States Navy. He was assigned to the new aircraft carrier USS Lexington (CV-2) in 1931, where he worked on radio communications, then in its nascent phase, with the carrier's airplanes. The carrier's captain was Ernest J. King, who later served as the Chief of Naval Operations during the Second World War. Heinlein was frequently interviewed during his later years by military historians who asked him about Captain King and his service as the commander of the U.S. Navy's first modern aircraft carrier. Heinlein also served aboard the destroyer USS Roper (DD-147) in 1933 and 1934, reaching the rank of Lieutenant. His brother, Lawrence Heinlein, served in the Army, the Air Force, and the Missouri National Guard and rose to the rank of Major General.^[8]

In 1929, Heinlein married Elinor Curry of Kansas City in Los Angeles,^[9] but the marriage lasted only about a year.^[2] In 1932 he married Leslyn Macdonald, who was born 29 August 1904 in Massachusetts and died 13 April 1981 in California. MacDonald was a political radical, and Isaac Asimov later recalled that Heinlein was, like her, "a flaming liberal." ^[10]

California[link]

In 1934, Heinlein was discharged from the Navy due to pulmonary tuberculosis. During a lengthy hospitalization, he developed the concept of the waterbed.^[11]

After his discharge, Heinlein attended a few weeks of graduate classes in mathematics and physics at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), but he soon quit either because of his health or from a desire to enter politics.^[12]

Heinlein supported himself at several occupations, including real estate sales and silver mining, but for some years found money in short supply. Heinlein was active in Upton Sinclair's socialist End Poverty in California movement in the early 1930s. When Sinclair gained the Democratic nomination for Governor of California in 1934, Heinlein worked actively in the campaign. Heinlein himself ran for the California State Assembly in 1938, but he was unsuccessful.^[13] In 1954, he wrote, "...many Americans ... were asserting loudly that McCarthy had created a 'reign of terror.' Are you terrified? I am not, and I have in my background much political activity well to the left of Senator McCarthy's position." ^[14]

Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and Isaac Asimov, Philadelphia Navy Yard, 1944.

Author[link]

While not destitute after the campaign—he had a small disability pension from the Navy—Heinlein turned to writing in order to pay off his mortgage. His first published story, "Life-Line", was printed in Astounding Science-Fiction magazine in 1939. Originally written for a contest, he instead sold it to Astounding for significantly more than the contest's first-prize payoff. He was quickly acknowledged as a leader of the new movement toward "social" science fiction. He was the guest of honor at Denvention, the 1941 Worldcon, held in Denver. During World War II, he did aeronautical engineering for the U.S. Navy, also recruiting Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp to work at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Pennsylvania. He also wrote for Boys' Life in 1952.

As the war wound down in 1945, Heinlein began re-evaluating his career. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with the outbreak of the Cold War, galvanized him to write nonfiction on political topics. In addition, he wanted to break into better-paying markets. He published four influential short stories for The Saturday Evening Post magazine, leading off, in February 1947, with "The Green Hills of Earth". That made him the first science fiction writer to break out of the "pulp ghetto". In 1950, the movie Destination Moon—the documentary-like film for which he had written the story and scenario, co-written the script, and invented many of the effects—won an Academy Award for special effects. Also, he embarked on a series of juvenile S.F. novels for the Charles Scribner's Sons publishing company that was to last through the 1950s (at the rate of one book per year).

Heinlein and his second wife divorced in 1947, and on October 21 of the following year he married Virginia "Ginny" Gerstenfeld, to whom he would remain married until his death forty years later. Shortly thereafter, the Heinlein couple moved to Colorado, but in 1965 her health was affected by the altitude. They moved to Santa Cruz, California while constructing a new residence in the adjacent Bonny Doon, California.^[15] The unique circular California house, which, like their Colorado house, he designed with Virginia, and built himself, is on Bonny Doon Road 37°3′31.72″N 122°9′30.46″W / 37.0588111°N 122.1584611°W / 37.0588111; -122.1584611.

Ginny undoubtedly served as a model for many of his intelligent, fiercely independent female characters.^[16][17] In 1953–1954, the Heinleins voyaged around the world (mostly via ocean liner and cargo liner), which Heinlein described in Tramp Royale, and which also provided background material for science fiction novels set aboard spaceships on long voyages, such as Podkayne of Mars and Friday. Ginny acted as the first reader of his manuscripts, and she was reputed to be a better engineer than Heinlein himself.^[18] Isaac Asimov believed that Heinlein made a swing to the right politically at the same time he married Ginny. Tramp Royale contains two lengthy apologias for the McCarthy hearings. The couple formed the small "Patrick Henry League" in 1958; and they worked in the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign.^[10]

Robert and Virginia Heinlein in Tahiti, 1980.

The Heinlein juveniles, S.F. novels for young adults, are also considered to be an important part of his output. He had used topical materials throughout his series, but in 1959, his Starship Troopers was considered by the Scribner's editorial staff to be too controversial for their prestige line, and they rejected it;^[19] Heinlein found another publisher, feeling himself released from the constraints of writing novels for children, and he began to write "my own stuff, my own way",^{[citation needed]} and he wrote a series of challenging books that redrew the boundaries of science fiction, including his best-known work, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966).

Later life and death[link]

Beginning in 1970, however, Heinlein had a series of health crises, broken by strenuous periods of activity in his hobby of stonemasonry. (In a private correspondence, he referred to that as his "usual and favorite occupation between books.")^[20] The decade began with a life-threatening attack of peritonitis, recovery from which required more than two years. As soon as he was well enough to write again, he began work on Time Enough for Love (1973), which introduced many of the themes found in his later fiction.

In the mid-1970s, Heinlein wrote two articles for the Britannica Compton Yearbook.^[21] He and Ginny crisscrossed the country helping to reorganize blood donation in the United States, and he was the guest of honor at the Worldcon for the third time at MidAmeriCon in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1976. While vacationing in Tahiti in early 1978, he suffered a transient ischemic attack. Over the next few months, he became more and more exhausted, and his health again began to decline. The problem was determined to be a blocked carotid artery, and he had one of the earliest known carotid bypass operations to correct it. Heinlein and Virginia had been smokers,^[22] and smoking appears often in his fiction, as well as fictitious strikable self-lighting cigarettes.

Asked to appear before a Joint Committee of the U.S. House and Senate that year, he testified on his belief that spin-offs from space technology were benefiting the infirm and the elderly. Heinlein's surgical treatment re-energized him, and he wrote five novels from 1980 until he died in his sleep from emphysema and heart failure on May 8, 1988.

At that time, he had been putting together the early notes for another World as Myth novel. Several of his other works have been published posthumously.^[23]

After his death, his wife Virginia Heinlein issued a compilation of Heinlein's correspondence and notes into a somewhat autobiographical examination of his career, published in 1989 under the title Grumbles from the Grave. Heinlein's archive is housed by the Special Collections department of McHenry Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The collection includes manuscript drafts, correspondence, photographs and artifacts. A substantial portion of the archive has been digitized and is available online through the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Archives.^[24]

Works[link]

Series[link]

Over the course of his career Heinlein wrote four somewhat overlapping series.

• Future History series
• Lazarus Long series
• The Heinlein juveniles, though they do not share any characters or take place in the same "universe" or timeline.
• World as Myth series

Early work, 1939–1958[link]

Heinlein began his career as a writer of stories for Astounding Science Fiction, a highly respected science fiction magazine, which was edited by John Campbell. The science fiction writer Frederik Pohl has described Heinlein as “that greatest of Campbell-era sf writers”.^[25] Isaac Asimov said that, from the time of his first story, it was accepted that Heinlein was the best science fiction writer in existence. He said that he would hold this title through his lifetime.^[26]

Alexei and Cory Panshin noted that Heinlein's impact was immediately felt. In 1940, the year after selling 'Life-Line' to Campbell, he wrote three short novels, four novelettes, and seven short stories. They went on to say that "No one ever dominated the science fiction field as Bob did in the first few years of his career.”^[27] Alexi expresses awe in Heinlein's ability to show readers a world so drastically different than the one we live in now, yet have so many similarities. He says that "We find ourselves not only in a world other than our own, but identifying with a living, breathing individual who is operating within its context, and thinking and acting according to its terms."^[28]

The first novel that Heinlein wrote, For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs (1939), did not see print during his lifetime, but Robert James tracked down the manuscript and it was published in 2003. Though some regarded as a failure as a novel,^[7] considering it little more than a disguised lecture on Heinlein's social theories, some readers took a very different view. In a review of it, John Clute wrote: “I’m not about to suggest that if Heinlein had been able to publish [such works] openly in the pages of Astounding in 1939, SF would have gotten the future right; I would suggest, however, that if Heinlein, and his colleagues, had been able to publish adult SF in Astounding and its fellow journals, then SF might not have done such a grotesquely poor job of prefiguring something of the flavor of actually living here at the onset of 2004.”^[29]

For Us, the Living was intriguing as a window into the development of Heinlein's radical ideas about man as a social animal, including his interest in free love. The root of many themes found in his later stories can be found in this book. It also contained much material that could be considered background for his other novels, including a detailed description of the protagonist's treatment to avoid being banned to Coventry (a place in the Heinlein mythos where unrepentant law-breakers are sent to experience actual anarchy).^{[citation needed]}

It appears that Heinlein at least attempted to live in a manner consistent with these ideals, even in the 1930s, and had an open relationship in his marriage to his second wife, Leslyn. He was also a nudist;^[2] nudism and body taboos are frequently discussed in his work. At the height of the Cold War, he built a bomb shelter under his house, like the one featured in Farnham's Freehold.^[2]

After For Us, The Living, Heinlein began selling (to magazines) first short stories, then novels, set in a Future History, complete with a time line of significant political, cultural, and technological changes. A chart of the future history was published in the May 1941 issue of Astounding. Over time, Heinlein wrote many novels and short stories that deviated freely from the Future History on some points, while maintaining consistency in some other areas. The Future History was eventually overtaken by actual events. These discrepancies were explained, after a fashion, in his later World as Myth stories.

Heinlein's first novel published as a book, Rocket Ship Galileo, was initially rejected because going to the moon was considered too far out, but he soon found a publisher, Scribner's, that began publishing a Heinlein juvenile once a year for the Christmas season.^[30] Eight of these books were illustrated by Clifford Geary in a distinctive white-on-black scratchboard style.^[31] Some representative novels of this type are Have Space Suit—Will Travel, Farmer in the Sky, and Starman Jones. Many of these were first published in serial form under other titles, e.g., Farmer in the Sky was published as Satellite Scout in the Boy Scout magazine Boys' Life. There has been speculation that Heinlein's intense obsession with his privacy was due at least in part to the apparent contradiction between his unconventional private life and his career as an author of books for children, but For Us, The Living also explicitly discusses the political importance Heinlein attached to privacy as a matter of principle.^[32]

The novels that Heinlein wrote for a young audience are commonly referred to as "the Heinlein juveniles", and they feature a mixture of adolescent and adult themes. Many of the issues that he takes on in these books have to do with the kinds of problems that adolescents experience. His protagonists are usually very intelligent teenagers who have to make their way in the adult society they see around them. On the surface, they are simple tales of adventure, achievement, and dealing with stupid teachers and jealous peers. However, Heinlein was a vocal proponent of the notion that juvenile readers were far more sophisticated and able to handle more complex or difficult themes than most people realized.

Thus even his juvenile stories often had a maturity to them that made them readable for adults. Red Planet, for example, portrays some very subversive themes, including a revolution in which young students are involved; his editor demanded substantial changes in this book's discussion of topics such as the use of weapons by children and the misidentified sex of the Martian character. Heinlein was always aware of the editorial limitations put in place by the editors of his novels and stories, and while he observed those restrictions on the surface, was often successful in introducing ideas not often seen in other authors' juvenile SF.

In 1957, James Blish wrote that one reason for Heinlein's success "has been the high grade of machinery which goes, today as always, into his story-telling. Heinlein seems to have known from the beginning, as if instinctively, technical lessons about fiction which other writers must learn the hard way (or often enough, never learn). He does not always operate the machinery to the best advantage, but he always seems to be aware of it."^[33]

1959–1960[link]

Heinlein decisively ended his juvenile novels with Starship Troopers (1959), a controversial work and his personal riposte to leftists calling for President Dwight D. Eisenhower to stop nuclear testing in 1958.

"'The "Patrick Henry" ad shocked 'em,' he wrote many years later. "Starship Troopers outraged 'em."^[34]

Starship Troopers is a coming-of-age story about duty, citizenship, and the role of the military in society. ^[35] The book portrays a society in which suffrage is earned by demonstrated willingness to place society's interests before one's own, at least for a short time and often under onerous circumstances, in government service; in the case of the protagonist, this was military service.

Later, in Expanded Universe, Heinlein said that it was his intention in the novel that service could include positions outside strictly military functions and such as teachers, police officers, and other government positions. This is presented in the novel as an outgrowth of the failure of unearned suffrage government and as a very successful arrangement. In addition, the franchise was only awarded after leaving the assigned service, thus those serving their terms—in the military, or any other service—were excluded from exercising any franchise. Career military were completely disenfranchised until retirement.

Starship Troopers was made into a 1997 film written by Ed Neumeier and directed by Paul Verhoeven. Admirers of Heinlein were critical of the movie, which they considered a betrayal of Heinlein's philosophy, presenting the society in which the story takes place as fascist.^[36] One admirer of Heinlein has said that the society depicted in the film showed only a superficial resemblance to the society that Heinlein describes in his book. This admirer summed up his critique of the film as follows. First, “while the Terran Federation in Starship Troopers is specifically stated to be a representative democracy, Ed Neumeier decided to make the government into a fascist state.....Second, the book was multiracial, but not so the movie: all the non-Anglo characters from the book have been replaced by characters who look like they stepped out of the Aryan edition of GQ.....Third, there is real element of sadism present in the movie which simply isn't present in the book.”^[37]

Middle period work, 1961–1973[link]

From about 1961 (Stranger in a Strange Land) to 1973 (Time Enough for Love), Heinlein explored some of his most important themes, such as individualism, libertarianism, and free expression of physical and emotional love. Three novels from this period, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Time Enough for Love, won the Libertarian Futurist Society's Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, designed to honor classic libertarian fiction.^[38] Jeff Riggenbach described The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as "unquestionably one of the three or four most influential libertarian novels of the last century" in the Mises Daily.^[39]

Heinlein did not publish Stranger in a Strange Land until some time after it was written, and the themes of free love and radical individualism are prominently featured in his long-unpublished first novel, For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs.^[40]

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress tells of a war of independence waged by the Lunar penal colonies, with significant comments from a major character, Professor La Paz, regarding the threat posed by government to individual freedom.

Although Heinlein had previously written a few short stories in the fantasy genre, during this period he wrote his first fantasy novel, Glory Road, and in Stranger in a Strange Land and I Will Fear No Evil, he began to mix hard science with fantasy, mysticism, and satire of organized religion. Critics William H. Patterson, Jr., and Andrew Thornton believe that this is simply an expression of Heinlein's longstanding philosophical opposition to positivism.^{[41][verification needed]} Heinlein stated that he was influenced by James Branch Cabell in taking this new literary direction. The penultimate novel of this period, I Will Fear No Evil, is according to critic James Gifford "almost universally regarded as a literary failure"^[42] and he attributes its shortcomings to Heinlein's near-death from peritonitis.

Later work, 1980–1987[link]

After a seven-year hiatus brought on by poor health, Heinlein produced five new novels in the period from 1980 (The Number of the Beast) to 1987 (To Sail Beyond the Sunset). These books have a thread of common characters and time and place. They most explicitly communicated Heinlein's philosophies and beliefs, and many long, didactic passages of dialog and exposition deal with government, sex, and religion. These novels are controversial among his readers and one critic, Dave Langford, has written about them very negatively.^[43] Heinlein's four Hugo awards were all for books written before this period.

Some of these books, such as The Number of the Beast and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, start out as tightly constructed adventure stories, but transform into philosophical fantasias at the end. It is a matter of opinion whether this demonstrates a lack of attention to craftsmanship or a conscious effort to expand the boundaries of science fiction, either into a kind of magical realism, continuing the process of literary exploration that he had begun with Stranger in a Strange Land, or into a kind of literary metaphor of quantum science (The Number of the Beast dealing with the Observer problem, and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls being a direct reference to the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment).

Most of the novels from this period are recognized by critics as forming an offshoot from the Future History series, and referred to by the term World as Myth.^[44]

The tendency toward authorial self-reference begun in Stranger in a Strange Land and Time Enough for Love becomes even more evident in novels such as The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, whose first-person protagonist is a disabled military veteran who becomes a writer, and finds love with a female character who, like many of Heinlein's strong female characters, appears to be based closely on his wife Ginny.^[45]

The 1982 novel Friday, a more conventional adventure story (borrowing a character and backstory from the earlier short story Gulf, also containing suggestions of connection to The Puppet Masters) continued a Heinlein theme of expecting what he saw as the continued disintegration of Earth's society, to the point where the title character is strongly encouraged to seek a new life off-planet. It concludes with a traditional Heinlein note, as in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or Time Enough for Love that freedom is to be found on the frontiers.

The 1984 novel Job: A Comedy of Justice is a sharp satire of organized religion.

Posthumous publications[link]

Several Heinlein works have been published since his death, including the aforementioned For Us, The Living as well as 1989's Grumbles from the Grave, a collection of letters between Heinlein and his editors and agent; 1992's Tramp Royale, a travelogue of a southern hemisphere tour the Heinleins took in the 1950s; Take Back Your Government, a how-to book about participatory democracy written in 1946; and a tribute volume called Requiem: Collected Works and Tributes to the Grand Master, containing some additional short works previously unpublished in book form. Off the Main Sequence, published in 2005, includes three short stories never before collected in any Heinlein book (Heinlein called them "stinkeroos").

Spider Robinson, a colleague, friend, and admirer of Heinlein,^[46] wrote Variable Star, based on an outline and notes for a juvenile novel that Heinlein prepared in 1955. The novel was published as a collaboration, with Heinlein's name above Robinson's on the cover, in 2006.

A complete collection of Heinlein's published work, conformed and copy-edited by several Heinlein scholars including biographer William H. Patterson is being published by the Heinlein Trust as the "Virginia Edition", after his wife.

Views[link]

Heinlein's books probe a range of ideas about a range of topics such as sex, race, politics, and the military. Many were seen as radical or as ahead of their time in their social criticism. His books have inspired considerable debate about the specifics, and the evolution, of Heinlein's own opinions, and have earned him both lavish praise and a degree of criticism. He has also been accused of contradicting himself on various philosophical questions.^[47] As Ted Gioia notes, Heinlein “has been accused of many things –- of being a libertine or a libertarian, a fascist or a fetishist, pre-Oedipal or just plain preposterous. Heinlein’s critics cut across all ends of the political spectrum, as do his fans. His admirers have ranged from Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the founder of American Atheists, to members of the Church of All Worlds, who hail Heinlein as a prophet. Apparently both true believers and non-believers, and perhaps some agnostics, have found sustenance in Heinlein’s prodigious output.”^[48]

Brian Doherty quotes Heinlein cites William Patterson, saying that best way to gain an understanding of Heinlein is as a "full-service iconoclast, the unique individual who decides that things do not have to be, and won't continue, as they are.” He says this vision is "at the heart of Heinlein, science fiction, libertarianism, and America. Heinlein imagined how everything about the human world, from our sexual mores to our religion to our automobiles to our government to our plans for cultural survival, might be flawed, even fatally so.”^[49]

The critic Elizabeth Anne Hull, for her part, has praised Heinlein for his interest in exploring fundamental life questions especially questions about “political power – our responsibilities to one another” and about “personal freedom, particularly sexual freedom.”^[50]

Politics[link]

Heinlein's political positions evolved throughout his life, though he was always strongly patriotic and firmly supported the United States military. Heinlein's early political leanings were liberal.^[51] In 1934 he worked actively for the Democratic campaign of Upton Sinclair for Governor of California. After Sinclair's loss, Heinlein became an anti-Communist Democratic activist. He made an unsuccessful bid for a California State Assembly seat in 1938.^[51] Heinlein's first novel, For Us, The Living (written 1939), consists largely of speeches advocating the Social Credit system, and the early story "Misfit" (1939) deals with an organization that seems to be Franklin D. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps translated into outer space.^{[citation needed]}

Heinlein's juvenile fiction of the 1940s and '50s, however, began to espouse conservative virtues. After 1945, he came to believe that a strong world government was the only way to avoid mutual nuclear annihilation. His 1949 novel Space Cadet describes a future scenario where a military-controlled global government enforces world peace. Heinlein ceased considering himself a Democrat in 1954.^[51]

Stranger in a Strange Land was embraced by the hippie counterculture, and libertarians have found inspiration in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Both groups found resonance with his themes of personal freedom in both thought and action.^[39]

Race[link]

Heinlein grew up in the era of racial segregation in the United States and wrote some of his most influential fiction at the height of the US civil rights movement. His early juveniles were very much ahead of their time both in their explicit rejection of racism and in their inclusion of non-white protagonists—in the context of science fiction before the 1960s, the mere existence of non-white characters was a remarkable novelty, with green occurring more often than brown. For example, his second juvenile, the 1948 Space Cadet, explicitly uses aliens as a metaphor for minorities.

Heinlein challenges his readers' possible racial preconceptions by introducing a strong, sympathetic character, only to reveal much later that he or she is of African or other descent; in several cases, the covers of the books show characters as being light-skinned, when in fact the text states, or at least implies, that they are dark-skinned or of African descent.^[54] Heinlein repeatedly denounced racism in his non-fiction works, including numerous examples in Expanded Universe.^{[citation needed]}

Race was a central theme in some of Heinlein's fiction. The most prominent and controversial example is Farnham's Freehold, which casts a white family into a future in which white people are the slaves of cannibalistic black rulers. In the 1941 novel Sixth Column (also known as The Day After Tomorrow), a white resistance movement in the United States defends itself against an invasion by an Asian fascist state (the "Pan-Asians") using a "super-science" technology that allows ray weapons to be tuned to specific races. The book is sprinkled with racist slurs against Asian people, and blacks and Hispanics are not mentioned at all.

The idea for the story was pushed on Heinlein by editor John W. Campbell, and Heinlein wrote later that he had "had to re-slant it to remove racist aspects of the original story line" and that he did not "consider it to be an artistic success."^[55][56] (However, the novel prompted a heated debate in the scientific community regarding the plausibility of developing ethnic bioweapons).^[57] Heinlein reveals near the end of Starship Troopers that the novel's protagonist and narrator, Johnny Rico, the formerly disaffected scion of a wealthy family, is Filipino and speaks Tagalog in addition to English.

Some of the alien species in Heinlein's fiction can be interpreted in terms of an allegorical representation of human ethnic groups.^{[citation needed]} It has been suggested that the strongly hierarchical and anti-individualistic "Bugs" in Starship Troopers were meant to represent the Chinese or Japanese, but Heinlein claimed to have written the book in response to "calls for the unilateral ending of nuclear testing by the United States."^[58] Heinlein suggests in the book that the Bugs are a good example of Communism being something that humans cannot successfully adhere to, since humans are strongly defined individuals, whereas the Bugs, being a collective, can all contribute to the whole without consideration of individual desire.^[59]

Individualism and self-determination[link]

In keeping with his belief in individualism, his work for adults—and sometimes even his work for juveniles—often portrays both the oppressors and the oppressed with considerable ambiguity. Heinlein believed that individualism was incompatible with ignorance. He believed that an appropriate level of adult competence was achieved through a wide-ranging education, whether this occurred in a classroom or not. In his juvenile novels, more than once a character looks with disdain at a student's choice of classwork, saying "Why didn't you study something useful?"^[60] In Time Enough for Love, Lazarus Long gives a long list of capabilities that anyone should have, concluding, "Specialization is for insects". The ability of the individual to create himself is explored in stories such as I Will Fear No Evil, "—All You Zombies—", and By His Bootstraps.

Sexual issues[link]

For Heinlein, personal liberation included sexual liberation, and free love was a major subject of his writing starting in 1939, with For Us, The Living. During his early period, Heinlein's writing for younger readers needed to take account of both editorial perceptions of sexuality in his novels, and potential perceptions among the buying public; as critic William H. Patterson has put it, his dilemma was "to sort out what was really objectionable from what was only excessive over-sensitivity to imaginary librarians".^[61] By his middle period, sexual freedom and the elimination of sexual jealousy were a major theme of Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), in which the progressively minded but sexually conservative reporter, Ben Caxton, acts as a dramatic foil for the less parochial characters, Jubal Harshaw and Valentine Michael Smith (Mike).^{[citation needed]}

Gary Westfahl points out that "Heinlein is a problematic case for feminists; on the one hand, his works often feature strong female characters and vigorous statements that women are equal to or even superior to men; but these characters and statements often reflect hopelessly stereotypical attitudes about typical female attributes. It is disconcerting, for example, that in Expanded Universe Heinlein calls for a society where all lawyers and politicians are women, essentially on the grounds that they possess a mysterious feminine practicality that men cannot duplicate." ^[62]

In books written as early as 1956, Heinlein dealt with incest and the sexual nature of children. Many of his books (including Time for the Stars, Glory Road, Time Enough for Love and The Number of the Beast) dealt explicitly or implicitly with incest, sexual feelings and relations between adults and children, or both.^[63] The treatment of these themes include the romantic relationship and eventual marriage (once the girl becomes an adult via time-travel) of a 30 year old engineer and an 11 year old girl in The Door into Summer or the more overt inter-familial incest in To Sail Beyond the Sunset and Farnham's Freehold. Peers such as L. Sprague DeCamp and Damon Knight have commented critically on Heinlein's portrayal of incest and pedophilia in a lighthearted and even approving manner.^[63]

Philosophy[link]

In To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Heinlein has the main character, Maureen, state that the purpose of metaphysics is to ask questions: Why are we here? Where are we going after we die? (and so on), and that "you are not allowed to answer the questions". Asking the questions is the point of metaphysics, but answering them is not, because once you answer this kind of question, you cross the line into religion. Maureen does not state a reason for this; she simply remarks that such questions are "beautiful" but lack answers. Maureen's son/lover Lazarus Long makes a related remark in Time Enough for Love. In order for us to answer the "big questions" about the universe, Lazarus states at one point, it would be necessary to stand outside the universe.

During the 1930's and 1940's, Heinlein was deeply interested in Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics and attended a number of seminars on the subject. His views on epistemology seem to have flowed from that interest, and his fictional characters continue to express Korzybskian views to the very end of his writing career. Many of his stories, such as Gulf, If This Goes On—, and Stranger in a Strange Land, depend strongly on the premise, related to the well-known Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that by using a correctly designed language, one can change or improve oneself mentally, or even realize untapped potential (as in the case of Joe Green in Gulf).^{[citation needed]}

When Ayn Rand's novel "The Fountainhead" was published, Heinlein was very favorably impressed, as quoted in "Grumbles...".^[64] Heinlein made quick work of altruism as a false virtue in Stranger in a Strange Land and mentioned John Galt--the hero in Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"--as a heroic archetype in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. He was also strongly affected by the religious philosopher P. D. Ouspensky.^[7] Freudianism and psychoanalysis were at the height of their influence during the peak of Heinlein's career, and stories such as Time for the Stars indulged in psychological theorizing.

However, he was skeptical about Freudianism, especially after a struggle with an editor who insisted on reading Freudian sexual symbolism into his juvenile novels. Heinlein was fascinated by the social credit movement in the 1930s. This is shown in Beyond This Horizon and in his 1938 novel For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs, which was finally published in 2003, long after his death. He was strongly committed to cultural relativism, and the sociologist Margaret Mader in his novel Citizen of the Galaxy is clearly a reference to Margaret Mead.

In the World War II era, cultural relativism was the only intellectual framework that offered a clearly reasoned alternative to racism,^{[citation needed]} which Heinlein was ahead of his time in opposing. Many of these sociological and psychological theories have been criticized, debunked, or heavily modified in the last fifty years, and Heinlein's use of them may now appear credulous and dated to many readers. The critic Patterson says "Korzybski is now widely regarded as a crank",^[65] although others^[who?] disagree.

Influence[link]

Heinlein is usually identified, along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, as one of the three masters of science fiction to arise in the so-called Golden Age of science fiction, associated with John W. Campbell and his magazine Astounding.^[66] In the 1950s he was a leader in bringing science fiction out of the low-paying and less prestigious "pulp ghetto". Most of his works, including short stories, have been continuously in print in many languages since their initial appearance and are still available as new paperbacks decades after his death.

Robert Heinlein was also influenced by the American writer, philosopher and humorist Charles Fort who is credited as a major influence on most of the leading science-fiction writers of the 20th-century. Heinlein was a lifelong member of the International Fortean Organization also known as INFO, the successor to the original Fortean Society. Heinlein's letters were often displayed on the walls of the INFO offices, and his active participation in the organization is mentioned in the INFO Journal.^{[citation needed]}

Heinlein crater on Mars.

He was at the top of his form during, and himself helped to initiate, the trend toward social science fiction, which went along with a general maturing of the genre away from space opera to a more literary approach touching on such adult issues as politics and human sexuality. In reaction to this trend, hard science fiction began to be distinguished as a separate subgenre, but paradoxically Heinlein is also considered a seminal figure in hard science fiction, due to his extensive knowledge of engineering, and the careful scientific research demonstrated in his stories. Heinlein himself stated—with obvious pride—that in the days before pocket calculators, he and his wife Virginia once worked for several days on a mathematical equation describing an Earth-Mars rocket orbit, which was then subsumed in a single sentence of the novel Space Cadet.

Heinlein has had a nearly ubiquitous influence on other science fiction writers. In a 1953 poll of leading science fiction authors, he was cited more frequently as an influence than any other modern writer.^[67] In 1974, he won the first Grand Master Award given by the Science Fiction Writers of America for lifetime achievement. Critic James Gifford writes that "Although many other writers have exceeded Heinlein's output, few can claim to match his broad and seminal influence. Scores of science fiction writers from the prewar Golden Age through the present day loudly and enthusiastically credit Heinlein for blazing the trails of their own careers, and shaping their styles and stories." ^[68]

Outside the science fiction community, several words and phrases coined or adopted by Heinlein have passed into common English usage: waldo, TANSTAAFL, moonbat,^[69] and grok.

In 1962, Oberon Zell-Ravenheart (then still using his birth name, Tim Zell) founded the Church of All Worlds, a Neopagan religious organization modeled in many ways after the treatment of religion in the novel Stranger in a Strange Land. This spiritual path included several ideas from the book, including polyamory, non-mainstream family structures, social libertarianism, water-sharing rituals, an acceptance of all religious paths by a single tradition, and the use of several terms such as "grok", "Thou art God", and "Never Thirst". Though Heinlein was neither a member nor a promoter of the Church, it was done with frequent correspondence between Zell and Heinlein, and he was a paid subscriber to their magazine Green Egg. This Church still exists as a 501(C)(3) religious organization incorporated in California, with membership worldwide, and it remains an active part of the neopagan community today.^{[70][verification needed]}

He was influential in making space exploration seem to the public more like a practical possibility. His stories in publications such as The Saturday Evening Post took a matter-of-fact approach to their outer-space setting, rather than the "gee whiz" tone that had previously been common. The documentary-like film Destination Moon advocated a Space Race with the Soviet Union almost a decade before such an idea became commonplace, and was promoted by an unprecedented publicity campaign in print publications. Many of the astronauts and others working in the U. S. space program grew up on a diet of the Heinlein juveniles,^{[original research?]} best evidenced by the naming of a crater on Mars after him, and a tribute interspersed by the Apollo 15 astronauts into their radio conversations while on the moon.^[71]

Heinlein was also a guest commentator for Walter Cronkite during Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's Apollo 11 moon landing. He remarked to Cronkite during the landing that, "This is the greatest event in human history, up to this time. This is -- today is New Year's Day of the Year One." ^[72]

Main-belt asteroid 6312 Robheinlein (1990 RH4), discovered on September 14, 1990 by H. E. Holt, at Palomar was named after him.^[73]

In 2001 the US Naval Academy created the Robert A. Heinlein Chair In Aerospace Engineering.^[74]

There was an active campaign to persuade the Secretary of the Navy to name the new Zumwalt class destroyer DDG-1001 the USS Robert A. Heinlein;^[75] however, DDG-1001 will be named USS Monsoor, after Michael Monsoor, a Navy SEAL who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor in Iraq.

Bibliography[link]

Heinlein published 32 novels, 59 short stories, and 16 collections during his life. Four films, two TV series, several episodes of a radio series, and a board game have been derived more or less directly from his work. He wrote a screenplay for one of the films. Heinlein edited an anthology of other writers' SF short stories.

Three nonfiction books and two poems have been published posthumously. One novel was published posthumously in 2003; another, written by Spider Robinson based on a sketchy outline by Heinlein, was published in September 2006. Four collections have been published posthumously.

See also[link]

United States Navy portal

• Heinlein Centennial Convention
• List of Robert A. Heinlein characters
• The Return of William Proxmire
• Requiem

References[link]

Other sources[link]

Critical

• H. Bruce Franklin. 1980. Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-502746-9.

A critique of Heinlein from a Marxist perspective. Somewhat out of date, since Franklin was not aware of Heinlein's work with the EPIC Movement. Includes a biographical chapter, which incorporates some original research on Heinlein's family background.

• James Gifford. 2000. Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader's Companion. Sacramento: Nitrosyncretic Press. ISBN 0-9679874-1-5 (hardcover), 0967987407 (trade paperback).

A comprehensive bibliography, with roughly one page of commentary on each of Heinlein's works.

• Panshin, Alexei. 1968. Heinlein in Dimension. Advent. ISBN 0-911682-12-0. Online edition at [1]
• Patterson, Jr., William H. and Thornton, Andrew. 2001. The Martian Named Smith: Critical Perspectives on Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Sacramento: Nitrosyncretic Press. ISBN 0-9679874-2-3.
• Powell, Jim. 2000. The Triumph of Liberty. New York: Free Press. See profile of Heinlein in the chapter "Out of this World".
• Tom Shippey. 2000. "Starship Troopers, Galactic Heroes, Mercenary Princes: the Military and its Discontents in Science Fiction", in Alan Sandison and Robert Dingley, eds., Histories of the Future: Studies in Fact, Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: Palgrave. ISBN 0-312-23604-2.
• George Edgar Slusser "Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in His Own Land". The Milford Series, Popular Writers of Today, Vol. 1. San Bernardino, CA: The Borgo Press
• James Blish, writing as William Atheling, Jr. 1970. More Issues at Hand. Chicago: Advent.
• Bellagamba, Ugo and Picholle, Eric. 2008. Solutions Non Satisfaisantes, une Anatomie de Robert A. Heinlein. Lyon, France: Les Moutons Electriques. ISBN 978-2-915793-37-6. (French)

Biographical

• Patterson, Jr., William H.. 2010. "Robert A. Heinlein in Dialogue With His Century - 1907-1948 Learning Curve. An Authorized Biography, Volume I." Tom Doherty Associates. ISBN 0-7653-1960-8
• Heinlein, Robert A.. 2004. For Us, the Living. New York: Scribner. ISBN 0-7432-5998-X.

Includes an introduction by Spider Robinson, an afterword by Robert E. James with a long biography, and a shorter biographical sketch.

• Patterson, Jr., William H. (1999). "Robert Heinlein - A biographical sketch". The Heinlein Journal 1999 (5): 7–36.  Also available at Robert A. Heinlein, a Biographical Sketch. Retrieved June 1, 2005.

A lengthy essay that treats Heinlein's own autobiographical statements with skepticism.

• The Heinlein Society and their FAQ. Retrieved May 30, 2005.

Contains a shorter version of the Patterson bio.

• Heinlein, Robert A.. 1997. Debora Aro is wrong. New York: Del Rey.

Outlines thoughts on coincidental thoughts and behavior and the famous argument over the course of three days with Debora Aro, renowned futurologist.

• Heinlein, Robert A.. 1989. Grumbles From the Grave. New York: Del Rey.

Incorporates a substantial biographical sketch by Virginia Heinlein, which hews closely to his earlier official bios, omitting the same facts (the first of his three marriages, his early left-wing political activities) and repeating the same fictional anecdotes (the short story contest).

• Vicary, Elizabeth Zoe. 2000. American National Biography Online article, Heinlein, Robert Anson. Retrieved June 1, 2005 (not available for free).

Repeats many incorrect statements from Heinlein's fictionalized professional bio.

• Heinlein, Robert A.. 1980. Expanded Universe. New York: Ace. ISBN 0-441-21888-1.

Autobiographical notes are interspersed between the pieces in the anthology.

Reprinted by Baen, hardcover October 2003, ISBN 0-7434-7159-8.

Reprinted by Baen, paperback July 2005, ISBN 0-7434-9915-8.

• Stover, Leon. 1987. Robert Heinlein. Boston: Twayne.

External links[link]

Find more about Robert A. Heinlein on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Definitions and translations from Wiktionary
	Images and media from Commons
	Learning resources from Wikiversity
	News stories from Wikinews
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource
	Textbooks from Wikibooks

• The Heinlein Society
• site:RAH
• Heinlein Archives
• Robert & Virginia Heinlein Prize
• Centennial Celebration in Kansas City, July 7, 2007.
• Heinlein Nexus, the community continuation of the Centennial effort.
• 1952 Popular Mechanics tour of Heinlein's Colorado house. accessed June 3, 2005
• Heinleinia.com, an interactive exploration of Heinlein's life and works

Biography and criticism

• Robert A. Heinlein biography at the Science Fiction Hall of Fame
• Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award—Also see Damon Knight's biography of Charles Fort.
• Frederik Pohl on Working with Robert A. Heinlein

Bibliography and works

For bibliography links see also the Robert A. Heinlein bibliography.

• Robert A. Heinlein at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Robert A. Heinlein at the Internet Movie Database
• Finding aid for the Robert A. and Virginia G. Heinlein Papers

Bradford Swain Linaweaver (born September 1, 1952) is a science fiction writer and screenwriter for low budget movies.

The novella version of his novel 'Moon of Ice' was a Nebula Award finalist and the novel length version won a Prometheus Award.

His other novels include Sliders (based on the television series), The Land Beyond Summer, four Doom novels with Dafydd ab Hugh, three Battlestar Galactica novels with actor Richard Hatch, and Anarquia with J. Kent Hastings.

Awards[link]

Linaweaver shares a second Prometheus Award with Ed Kramer for co-editing Free Space, a major libertarian science fiction anthology from TOR books.

Praise from Ronald Reagan[link]

President Ronald Reagan praised an early article Linaweaver wrote, making the case for capitalism against socialism. Reagan summed up his commentary on Linaweaver with the line, "How right he is!" The radio broadcast is included in the Reagan CD set, In His Own Voice, and in the book, Stories in His Own Hand: The Everyday Wisdom of Ronald Reagan.

Heinlein's Brass Cannon[link]

Linaweaver owns a small brass cannon. The cannon was originally acquired by science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein and his wife Virginia Heinlein, sometime prior to 1960. For nearly 30 years, the firing of the brass cannon was a 4 July tradition at the Heinlein residence. Virginia Heinlein retained the cannon after her husband's death in 1988, and it was bequeathed to Linaweaver in her will, after Virginia died in 2003. Linaweaver restored the cannon to working order and subsequently posted a 2007 video of it being fired several times (with very small charges) on YouTube.^[1]

Mondo Cult Magazine[link]

Linaweaver publishes the movie magazine Mondo Cult, featuring literary contributions and articles from and about Linaweaver's eclectic list of celebrity friends and contacts, including Battlestar Galactica actor Richard Hatch; science fiction author and collector Forrest J. Ackerman; the conservative commentator, publisher, and television personality William F. Buckley, Jr.; actress Traci Lords and poetry from Ray Bradbury.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Big Lizards blog with ab Hugh and his wife Sachi
• Brad Linaweaver at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Brad Linaweaver at the Internet Movie Database

Isaac Asimov
Asimov in 1965
Born	Isaak Yudovich Ozimov Between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920[1] Petrovichi, Russian SFSR
Died	April 6, 1992(1992-04-06) (aged 72) New York City, New York, United States
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, essayist, historian, Professor of biochemistry, textbook writer, humorist
Nationality	American
Ethnicity	Russian Jewish
Education	Columbia University, PhD. Biochemistry, 1948
Genres	Science fiction (hard SF), popular science, mystery fiction, essays, literary criticism
Literary movement	Golden Age of Science Fiction
Notable work(s)	The Foundation Series, the Robot Series, Nightfall, The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science, I, Robot, Planets for Man
Influences Clifford D. Simak John W. Campbell, Jr. H.G. Wells Stanley G. Weinbaum Edward Gibbon Humanism
Signature
www.asimovonline.com

Isaac Asimov (/ˈaɪzək ˈæzɨməv/ EYE-zək AZ-i-məv; born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov, Russian: Исаак Юдович Озимов; Yiddish: אייזיק יודאָוויטש אסימאוו; c. January 2, 1920^[1] – April 6, 1992) was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards.^[2] His works have been published in all ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System (although his only work in the 100s—which covers philosophy and psychology—was a foreword for The Humanist Way).^[3]

Asimov is widely considered a master of hard science fiction and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, he was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers during his lifetime.^[4] Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series;^[5] his other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series, both of which he later tied into the same fictional universe as the Foundation Series to create a unified "future history" for his stories much like those pioneered by Robert A. Heinlein and previously produced by Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson.^[6] He wrote many short stories, among them "Nightfall", which in 1964 was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best short science fiction story of all time. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.^[7]

The prolific Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much non-fiction. Most of his popular science books explain scientific concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. He often provides nationalities, birth dates, and death dates for the scientists he mentions, as well as etymologies and pronunciation guides for technical terms. Examples include Guide to Science, the three volume set Understanding Physics, Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery, as well as works on astronomy, mathematics, the Bible, William Shakespeare's writing and chemistry.

Asimov was a long-time member and Vice President of Mensa International, albeit reluctantly; he described some members of that organization as "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs."^[8] He took more joy in being president of the American Humanist Association.^[9] The asteroid 5020 Asimov, a crater on the planet Mars,^[10] a Brooklyn, New York elementary school, and one Isaac Asimov literary award are named in his honor.

Biography[link]

Asimov was born sometime between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920^[1] in Petrovichi in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (near the modern border with Belarus) to Anna Rachel Berman Asimov and Judah Asimov, a family of Jewish millers. While his exact date of birth is uncertain, Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2.^[1]

The family name derives from озимые (ozimiye), a Russian word for winter grains in which his great-grandfather dealt, to which a patronymic suffix was added. His name in Russian was originally Isaak Ozimov (Russian: Исаак Озимов); but he was later known in Russia as Ayzyek Azimov (Айзек Азимов),^[11] a Russian Cyrillic adaptation of the American English pronunciation.

Asimov had two younger siblings; a sister, Marcia (born Manya,^[12] June 17, 1922-April 2, 2011^[13]), and a brother, Stanley (July 25, 1929-August 16, 1995^[14]), who was vice-president of New York Newsday.^[15][16].

His family emigrated to the United States when he was three years old. Since his parents always spoke Yiddish and English with him, he never learned Russian.^[17] Growing up in Brooklyn, New York City, Asimov taught himself to read at the age of five^[18] and remained fluent in Yiddish as well as English.^[19] Asimov wrote of his father, "My father, for all his education as an Orthodox Jew, was not Orthodox in his heart", and "he didn't recite the myriad prayers prescribed for every action, and he never made any attempt to teach them to me."^[20]

His parents owned a succession of candy stores, and everyone in the family was expected to work in them.

Education and career[link]

Asimov began reading science fiction pulp magazines at a young age.^[21] His father, as a matter of principle, forbade reading the pulps, as he considered them to be trash, but Asimov persuaded him that the science fiction magazines had "Science" in the title, so they were educational. Around the age of eleven, he began to write his own stories, and by age nineteen—after he discovered science fiction fandom—he was selling stories to the science fiction magazines. John W. Campbell, then editor of Astounding Science Fiction, had a strong formative influence on Asimov and eventually became a personal friend.^[22]

Asimov attended New York City public schools, including Boys High School, in Brooklyn, New York.^[23] Graduating at 15, he went on to Seth Low Junior College, a branch of Columbia University in Brooklyn designed to admit larger numbers of Jewish and Italian-American students at Columbia College, then the institution's primary undergraduate school for men. Originally a zoology major, Asimov changed his subject to chemistry after his first semester as he disapproved of "dissecting an alley cat". After Seth Low Junior College closed in 1938, Asimov finished his BS degree at University Extension (later the Columbia University School of General Studies) in 1939. When he failed to secure admission to medical school, he applied to the graduate program in chemistry at Columbia; initially rejected and then only accepted on a probationary basis, Asimov completed his MA in chemistry in 1941 and earned a PhD in biochemistry in 1948. In between, he spent three years during World War II working as a civilian at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station. After the war ended, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving for almost nine months before receiving an honorable discharge. In the course of his brief military career, he rose to the rank of corporal on the basis of his typing skills, and narrowly avoided participating in the 1946 atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll.

Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and Isaac Asimov, Philadelphia Navy Yard, 1944

After completing his doctorate, Asimov joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine, with which he remained associated thereafter.^[24] From 1958, this was in a non-teaching capacity, as he turned to writing full-time (his writing income had already exceeded his academic salary). Being tenured meant that he retained the title of associate professor, and in 1979 the university honored his writing by promoting him to full professor of biochemistry. Asimov's personal papers from 1965 onward are archived at the university's Mugar Memorial Library, to which he donated them at the request of curator Howard Gottlieb. The collection fills 464 boxes, or seventy-one meters of shelf space.

Personal life[link]

Asimov married Gertrude Blugerman (1917, Canada–1990, Boston) on July 26, 1942. They had two children, David (b. 1951) and Robyn Joan (b. 1955). In 1970 they separated and Asimov moved back to New York, this time to Manhattan, where he lived for the rest of his life. He immediately began seeing Janet O. Jeppson, and married her two weeks after his divorce from Gertrude in 1973.^[25]

Asimov was a claustrophile: he enjoyed small, enclosed spaces.^[26] In the third volume of his autobiography, he recalls a childhood desire to own a magazine stand in a New York City Subway station, within which he could enclose himself and listen to the rumble of passing trains while reading.^[27]

Asimov was afraid of flying,^[28] only doing so twice in his entire life (once in the course of his work at the Naval Air Experimental Station, and once returning home from the army base in Oahu in 1946)^[28] He seldom traveled great distances, partly because his aversion to flying complicated the logistics of long-distance travel. This phobia influenced several of his fiction works, such as the Wendell Urth mystery stories and the Robot novels featuring Elijah Baley. In his later years, he found he enjoyed traveling on cruise ships, and on several occasions he became part of the cruises' "entertainment", giving science-themed talks on ships such as the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2.^[28]

Asimov was an able public speaker and was a frequent fixture at science fiction conventions, where he was friendly and approachable.^[28] He patiently answered tens of thousands of questions and other mail with postcards, and was pleased to give autographs. He was of medium height, stocky, with mutton chop whiskers and a distinct New York accent. His physical dexterity was very poor. He never learned to swim or ride a bicycle; however, he did learn to drive a car after he moved to Boston. In his humor book Asimov Laughs Again, he describes Boston driving as "anarchy on wheels".^[29]

Asimov's wide interests included his participation in his later years in organizations devoted to the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan^[28] and in The Wolfe Pack,^[30] a group of devotees of the Nero Wolfe mysteries written by Rex Stout. Many of his short stories mention or quote Gilbert and Sullivan.^[31] He was a prominent member of the Baker Street Irregulars, the leading Sherlock Holmes society.^[28] He was also a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of his fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers.^[32]

In 1984, the American Humanist Association (AHA) named him the Humanist of the Year. From 1985 until his death in 1992, he served as president of the AHA, an honorary appointment; his successor was his friend and fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut. He was also a close friend of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, and earned a screen credit on Star Trek: The Motion Picture for advice he gave during production (generally, confirming to Paramount Pictures that Roddenberry's ideas were legitimate science-fictional extrapolation).

Illness and death[link]

Asimov suffered a heart attack in 1977, and had triple bypass surgery in December 1983. When he died in New York City on April 6, 1992, his brother Stanley reported heart and kidney failure as the cause of death.^[33] He was survived by his second wife, Janet, and his children from his first marriage. Ten years after his death, Janet Asimov's edition of Asimov's autobiography, It's Been a Good Life, revealed that the myocardial and renal complications were the result of an infection by HIV, which he had contracted from a blood transfusion received during his bypass operation.^[34] Janet Asimov wrote in the epilogue of It's Been a Good Life that Asimov's doctors advised him against going public, warning that the anti-AIDS prejudice would likely extend to his family members. Asimov's family considered disclosing his condition after his death, but the controversy that erupted when Arthur Ashe announced his own HIV infection (also contracted from a blood transfusion during heart surgery) convinced them otherwise. Ten years later, after most of Asimov's doctors had died, Janet and Robyn Asimov agreed that the HIV story should be made public.^[35]

Writings[link]

Overview[link]

Rowena Morrill depicts Asimov enthroned with symbols of his life's work

Asimov's career can be divided into several time periods. His early career, dominated by science fiction, began with short stories in 1939 and novels in 1950. This lasted until about 1958, all but ending after publication of The Naked Sun. He began publishing nonfiction in 1952, co-authoring a college-level textbook called Biochemistry and Human Metabolism. Following the brief orbit of the first man-made satellite Sputnik I by the USSR in 1957, his production of nonfiction, particularly popular science books, greatly increased, with a consequent drop in his science fiction output. Over the next quarter century, he wrote only four science fiction novels. Starting in 1982, the second half of his science fiction career began with the publication of Foundation's Edge. From then until his death, Asimov published several more sequels and prequels to his existing novels, tying them together in a way he had not originally anticipated, making a unified series. There are, however, many inconsistencies in this unification, especially in his earlier stories.^[36]

Asimov believed that his most enduring contributions would be his "Three Laws of Robotics" and the Foundation Series (see Yours, Isaac Asimov, p. 329). Furthermore, the Oxford English Dictionary credits his science fiction for introducing the words positronic (an entirely fictional technology), psychohistory (which is also used for a different study on historical motivations) and robotics into the English language. Asimov coined the term robotics without suspecting that it might be an original word; at the time, he believed it was simply the natural analogue of words such as mechanics and hydraulics, but for robots. Unlike his word psychohistory, the word robotics continues in mainstream technical use with Asimov's original definition. Star Trek: The Next Generation featured androids with "positronic brains" giving Asimov full credit for "inventing" this fictional technology. His fictional writings for space and time are similar to the writings of Brian W Aldiss, Poul Anderson and Gregory Benford.

Science fiction[link]

Asimov first began reading the science fiction pulp magazines sold in his family's confectionery store in 1929. He came into contact with science fiction fandom in the mid-1930s, particularly the circle that became the Futurians. He began writing his first science fiction story, "Cosmic Corkscrew", in 1937, but failed to finish it until June 1938, when he was inspired to do so after a visit to the offices of Astounding Science Fiction. He finished "Cosmic Corkscrew" on June 19, and submitted the story in person to Astounding editor John W. Campbell two days later. Campbell rejected "Cosmic Corkscrew", but encouraged Asimov to keep trying, and Asimov did so. Asimov sold his third story, "Marooned Off Vesta", to Amazing Stories magazine in October, and it appeared in the March 1939 issue. He continued to write and sometimes sell stories to the science fiction pulps.

In 1941, he published his 32nd story, "Nightfall", which has been described as one of "the most famous science-fiction stories of all time".^[37] In 1968 the Science Fiction Writers of America voted "Nightfall" the best science fiction short story ever written.^[38] In his short story collection Nightfall and Other Stories he wrote, "The writing of 'Nightfall' was a watershed in my professional career ... I was suddenly taken seriously and the world of science fiction became aware that I existed. As the years passed, in fact, it became evident that I had written a 'classic'".

"Nightfall" is an archetypal example of social science fiction, a term coined by Asimov to describe a new trend in the 1940s, led by authors including Asimov and Heinlein, away from gadgets and space opera and toward speculation about the human condition.

By 1941 Asimov had begun selling regularly to Astounding, which was then the field's leading magazine. From 1943 to 1949, all of his published science fiction appeared in Astounding.

In 1942 he published the first of his Foundation stories—later collected in the Foundation Trilogy: Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953)—which recount the collapse and rebirth of a vast interstellar empire in a universe of the future. Taken together, they are his most famous work of science fiction, along with the Robot Series. Many years later, due to pressure by fans on Asimov to write another,^[24] he continued the series with Foundation's Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986), and then went back to before the original trilogy with Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1992). The series features his fictional science of Psychohistory in which the future course of the history of large populations can be predicted.

His positronic robot stories—many of which were collected in I, Robot (1950)—were begun at about the same time. They promulgated a set of rules of ethics for robots (see Three Laws of Robotics) and intelligent machines that greatly influenced other writers and thinkers in their treatment of the subject. Asimov notes in one of his biographical pieces that he was largely inspired by the almost relentless tendency of robots up to that time to fall consistently into a Frankenstein plot in which they destroyed their creator. One such robot story, a short titled "The Bicentennial Man", was made into a film starring Robin Williams.

The 2004 film I, Robot, starring Will Smith, was based on a script by Jeff Vintar entitled Hardwired, with Asimov's ideas incorporated later after acquiring the rights to the I, Robot title.^[39] It is not related to the I, Robot script by Harlan Ellison, who collaborated with Asimov himself to create a version that captured the spirit of the original. Asimov is quoted as saying that Ellison's screenplay would lead to "the first really adult, complex, worthwhile science fiction movie ever made". The screenplay was published in book form in 1994, after hopes of seeing it in film form were becoming slim.

Besides movies, his Foundation and Robot stories have inspired other derivative works of science fiction literature, many by well-known and established authors such as Roger MacBride Allen, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford and David Brin. These appear to have been done with the blessing, and often at the request of, Asimov's widow Janet Asimov.

In 1948 he also wrote a spoof chemistry article, "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline". At the time, Asimov was preparing his own doctoral dissertation, and for the oral examination to follow that. Fearing a prejudicial reaction from his graduate school evaluation board at Columbia University, Asimov asked his editor that it be released under a pseudonym, yet it appeared under his own name because of a mistake by the publisher. During his oral examination shortly thereafter, Asimov grew concerned at the scrutiny he received. At the end of the examination, one evaluator turned to him, smiling, and said "Mr. Asimov, tell us something about the thermodynamic properties of the compound thiotimoline". The stuttering Asimov was sent out of the room then. After a 20-minute or so wait, he was summoned back into the Examination Room and congratulated as "Dr. Asimov."

In 1949, the book publisher Doubleday's science fiction editor Walter I. Bradbury accepted Asimov's unpublished novelette "Grow Old Along With Me" (40,000 words) for publication, but requested that it be extended to a full novel of 70,000 words. The book appeared under the Doubleday imprint in January 1950 with the title of Pebble in the Sky. The Doubleday company went on to publish five more original science fiction novels by Asimov in the 1950s, along with the six juvenile Lucky Starr novels, the latter under the pseudonym of "Paul French". Doubleday also published collections of Asimov's short stories, beginning with The Martian Way and Other Stories in 1955. The early 1950s also saw the Gnome Press company publishing one collection of Asimov's positronic robot stories as I, Robot and his Foundation stories and novelettes as the three books of the Foundation Trilogy. More positronic robot stories were republished in book form as The Rest of the Robots.

When new science fiction magazines, notably Galaxy magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, appeared in the 1950s, Asimov began publishing short stories in them as well. He would later refer to the 1950s as his "golden decade". A number of these stories are included in his Best of anthology, including "The Last Question" (1956), on the ability of humankind to cope with and potentially reverse the process of entropy. It was his personal favorite and considered by many to be equal to "Nightfall". Asimov wrote of it in 1973:

Why is it my favorite? For one thing I got the idea all at once and didn't have to fiddle with it; and I wrote it in white-heat and scarcely had to change a word. This sort of thing endears any story to any writer. Then, too, it has had the strangest effect on my readers. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can give them the name of a story, which they think I may have written, and tell them where to find it. They don't remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably "The Last Question". This has reached the point where I recently received a long-distance phone call from a desperate man who began, 'Dr. Asimov, there's a story I think you wrote, whose title I can't remember—' at which point I interrupted to tell him it was "The Last Question" and when I described the plot it proved to be indeed the story he was after. I left him convinced I could read minds at a distance of a thousand miles.

In December 1974, former Beatle Paul McCartney approached Asimov and asked him if he could write the screenplay for a science-fiction movie musical. McCartney had a vague idea for the plot and a small scrap of dialogue; he wished to make a film about a rock band whose members discover they are being impersonated by a group of extraterrestrials. The band and their impostors would likely be played by McCartney's group Wings, then at the height of their career. Intrigued by the idea, although he was not generally a fan of rock music, Asimov quickly produced a "treatment" or brief outline of the story. He adhered to McCartney's overall idea, producing a story he felt to be moving and dramatic. However, he did not make use of McCartney's brief scrap of dialogue, and probably as a consequence, McCartney rejected the story. The treatment now exists only in the Boston University archives.

Beginning in 1977, Asimov lent his name to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (now Asimov's Science Fiction) and penned an editorial for each issue. There was also a short-lived Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine and a companion Asimov's Science Fiction Anthology reprint series, published as magazines (in the same manner as the stablemates Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine's and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine's "anthologies").

Popular science[link]

During the late 1950s and 1960s, Asimov shifted gears somewhat, and substantially decreased his fiction output (he published only four adult novels between 1957's The Naked Sun and 1982's Foundation's Edge, two of which were mysteries). At the same time, he greatly increased his non-fiction production, writing mostly on science topics; the launch of Sputnik in 1957 engendered public concern over a "science gap", which Asimov's publishers were eager to fill with as much material as he could write.

Meanwhile, the monthly Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction invited him to continue his regular non-fiction column, begun in the now-folded bimonthly companion magazine Venture Science Fiction Magazine, ostensibly dedicated to popular science, but with Asimov having complete editorial freedom. The first of the F&SF columns appeared in November 1958, and they followed uninterrupted thereafter, with 399 entries, until Asimov's terminal illness. These columns, periodically collected into books by his principal publisher, Doubleday, helped make Asimov's reputation as a "Great Explainer" of science, and were referred to by him as his only pop-science writing in which he never had to assume complete ignorance of the subjects at hand on the part of his readers. The popularity of his first wide-ranging reference work, The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science, also allowed him to give up most of his academic responsibilities and become essentially a full-time freelance writer.

Asimov wrote several essays on the social contentions of his time, including "Thinking About Thinking" and "Science: Knock Plastic" (1967).

The great variety of information covered in Asimov's writings once prompted Kurt Vonnegut to ask, "How does it feel to know everything?" Asimov replied that he only knew how it felt to have the reputation of omniscience—"Uneasy". (See In Joy Still Felt, chapter 30.) In the introduction to his story collection Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon admitted that he relied upon Asimov's science popularizations (and the Oxford English Dictionary) to provide his knowledge of entropy.

It is a mark of the friendship and respect accorded Asimov by Arthur C. Clarke that the so-called "Asimov-Clarke Treaty of Park Avenue", put together as they shared a cab ride along Park Avenue in New York, stated that Asimov was required to insist that Clarke was the best science fiction writer in the world (reserving second-best for himself), while Clarke was required to insist that Asimov was the best science writer in the world (reserving second-best for himself).^[40] Thus the dedication in Clarke's book Report on Planet Three (1972) reads: "In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer."

Coined terms[link]

Asimov coined the term "robotics" in his 1941 story Liar!,^[41] though he later remarked that he believed then that he was merely using an existing word, as he stated in Gold ("The Robot Chronicles"), though while acknowledging the Oxford Dictionary reference, he incorrectly states that the word was first printed about one third of the way down the first column of page 100, Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942 printing of his short story "Runaround" .^[42][43]

Asimov also coined the term "spome" in a paper entitled, “There’s No Place Like Spome” in Atmosphere in Space Cabins and Closed Environments,^[44] originally presented as a paper to the American Chemical Society on September 13, 1965. It refers to any system closed with respect to matter and open with respect to energy capable of sustaining human life indefinitely.

Other writings[link]

In addition to his interest in science, Asimov was also greatly interested in history. Starting in the 1960s, he wrote 14 popular history books, most notably The Greeks: A Great Adventure (1965), The Roman Republic (1966), The Roman Empire (1967), The Egyptians (1967) and The Near East: 10,000 Years of History (1968).

He published Asimov's Guide to the Bible in two volumes—covering the Old Testament in 1967 and the New Testament in 1969— and then combined them into one 1,300-page volume in 1981. Complete with maps and tables, the guide goes through the books of the Bible in order, explaining the history of each one and the political influences that affected it, as well as biographical information about the important characters. His interest in literature manifested itself in several annotations of literary works, including Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare (1970), Asimov's Annotated Paradise Lost (1974), and The Annotated Gulliver's Travels (1980).

Asimov was also a noted mystery author and a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. He began by writing science fiction mysteries such as his Wendell Urth stories but soon moved on to writing "pure" mysteries. He only published two full-length mystery novels but he wrote a fair number of stories about the Black Widowers, a group of men who met monthly for dinner, conversation, and a puzzle. He got the idea for the Widowers from his own association in a stag group called the Trap Door Spiders and all of the main characters (with the exception of the waiter, Henry, whom he admitted resembled Wodehouse's Jeeves) were modeled after his closest friends.^[45]

Toward the end of his life, Asimov published a series of collections of limericks, mostly written by himself, starting with Lecherous Limericks, which appeared in 1975. Limericks: Too Gross, whose title displays Asimov's love of puns, contains 144 limericks by Asimov and an equal number by John Ciardi. He even created a slim volume of Sherlockian limericks (and embarrassed one fan by autographing her copy with an impromptu limerick that rhymed 'Nancy' with 'romancy'). Asimov featured Yiddish humor in Azazel, The Two Centimeter Demon. The two main characters, both Jewish, talk over dinner, or lunch, or breakfast, about anecdotes of "George" and his friend Azazel. Asimov's Treasury of Humor is both a working joke book and a treatise propounding his views on humor theory. According to Asimov, the most essential element of humor is an abrupt change in point of view, one that suddenly shifts focus from the important to the trivial, or from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Particularly in his later years, Asimov to some extent cultivated an image of himself as an amiable lecher. In 1971, as a response to the popularity of sexual guidebooks such as The Sensuous Woman (by "J") and The Sensuous Man (by "M"), Asimov published The Sensuous Dirty Old Man under the byline "Dr. 'A'" (although his full name was printed on the paperback edition, first published 1972).

Asimov published two volumes of autobiography: In Memory Yet Green (1979) and In Joy Still Felt (1980). A third autobiography, I. Asimov: A Memoir, was published in April 1994. The epilogue was written by his widow Janet Asimov a decade after his death. It's Been a Good Life (2002), edited by Janet, is a condensed version of his three autobiographies. He also published three volumes of retrospectives of his writing, Opus 100 (1969), Opus 200 (1979), and Opus 300 (1984).

In 1987, the Asimovs co-wrote How to Enjoy Writing: A Book of Aid and Comfort. In it they offer advice on how to maintain a positive attitude and stay productive when dealing with discouragement, distractions, rejection and thick-headed editors. The book includes many quotations, essays, anecdotes and husband-wife dialogues about the ups and downs of being an author.

Asimov and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry developed a unique relationship during Star Trek's initial launch in the late 1960s. Asimov wrote a critical essay on Star Trek's scientific accuracy for TV Guide magazine. Roddenberry retorted respectfully with a personal letter explaining the limitations of accuracy when writing a weekly series. Asimov corrected himself with a follow-up essay to TV Guide claiming despite its inaccuracies, that Star Trek was a fresh and intellectually challenging science fiction television show. The two remained friends to the point where Asimov even served as an advisor on a number of Star Trek projects.

In 1973, Asimov published a proposal for calendar reform, called the World Season Calendar. It divides the year into four seasons (named A–D) of 13 weeks (91 days) each. This allows days to be named, e.g., "D-73" instead of December 1. An extra Year Day is added for a total of 365 days.^[46]

Awards[link]

• 1957 – Thomas Alva Edison Foundation Award, for Building Blocks of the Universe
• 1960 – Howard W. Blakeslee Award from the American Heart Association for The Living River
• 1962 – Boston University's Publication Merit Award
• 1963 – special Hugo Award for "adding science to science fiction" for essays published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
• 1963 – Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences^[47]
• 1965 – James T. Grady Award of the American Chemical Society (now called the James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry)
• 1966 – Best All-time Novel Series Hugo Award for the Foundation series
• 1967 – Westinghouse Science Writing Award
• 1972 – Nebula Award for Best Novel for The Gods Themselves^[48]
• 1973 – Hugo Award for Best Novel for The Gods Themselves^[49]
• 1973 – Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel for The Gods Themselves^[49]
• 1977 – Hugo Award for Best Novelette for The Bicentennial Man
• 1977 – Nebula Award for Best Novelette for The Bicentennial Man
• 1981 – An asteroid, 5020 Asimov, was named in his honor
• 1983 – Hugo Award for Best Novel for Foundation's Edge^[50]
• 1983 – Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel for Foundation's Edge^[50]
• 1987 – Nebula Grand Master award, a lifetime achievement award^[51]
• 1992 – Hugo Award for Best Novelette for Gold
• 1995 – Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book for I. Asimov: A Memoir
• 1996 – A 1946 Retro-Hugo for Best Novel of 1945 was given at the 1996 WorldCon to "The Mule", the 7th Foundation story, published in Astounding Science Fiction
• 1997 – Posthumous induction into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame
• 2009 – A crater on the planet Mars, Asimov,^[52] was named in his honor
• 14 honorary doctorate degrees from various universities

Writing style[link]

Characteristics[link]

One of the most common impressions of Asimov's fiction work is that his writing style is extremely unornamented. In 1980, science fiction scholar James Gunn, professor emeritus of English at the University of Kansas wrote of I, Robot:^[53]

Except for two stories—"Liar!" and "Evidence"—they are not stories in which character plays a significant part. Virtually all plot develops in conversation with little if any action. Nor is there a great deal of local color or description of any kind. The dialogue is, at best, functional and the style is, at best, transparent ... The robot stories—and, as a matter of fact, almost all Asimov fiction—play themselves on a relatively bare stage.

Gunn observes that there are places where Asimov's style rises to the demands of the situation; he cites the climax of "Liar!" as an example. Sharply drawn characters occur at key junctures of his storylines: Susan Calvin in "Liar!" and "Evidence", Arkady Darell in Second Foundation, Elijah Baley in The Caves of Steel and Hari Seldon in the Foundation prequels. Asimov addresses this criticism at the beginning of his book Nemesis:^[54]

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.

Some details of Asimov's imaginary future technology as he described in the 1940s and 1950s have not aged well. For example, he described powerful robots and computers from the distant future using punched cards or punched tape and engineers using slide rules. In one dramatic scene in Foundation and Empire, a character gets the news by buying a paper at a vending machine. Of course, this charge could be leveled at virtually any writer of science fiction and has little critical impact.

In addition, his stories also have occasional internal contradictions: names and dates given in the Foundation Series do not always agree with one another, for example. Some such errors may plausibly be due to mistakes the characters make, since characters in Asimov stories are seldom fully informed about their own situations. Other contradictions resulted from the many years elapsed between the time Asimov began the Foundation series and when he resumed work on it; occasionally, advances in scientific knowledge forced him to revise his own fictional history.

Other than books by Gunn and Patrouch, there is a relative dearth of "literary" criticism on Asimov (particularly when compared to the sheer volume of his output). Cowart and Wymer's Dictionary of Literary Biography (1981) gives a possible reason:

His words do not easily lend themselves to traditional literary criticism because he has the habit of centering his fiction on plot and clearly stating to his reader, in rather direct terms, what is happening in his stories and why it is happening. In fact, most of the dialogue in an Asimov story, and particularly in the Foundation trilogy, is devoted to such exposition. Stories that clearly state what they mean in unambiguous language are the most difficult for a scholar to deal with because there is little to be interpreted.

In fairness, Gunn's and Patrouch's respective studies of Asimov both take the stand that a clear, direct prose style is still a style. Gunn's 1982 book goes into considerable depth commenting upon each of Asimov's novels published to that date. He does not praise all of Asimov's fiction (nor does Patrouch), but he does call some passages in The Caves of Steel "reminiscent of Proust." When discussing how that novel depicts night falling over futuristic New York City, Gunn says that Asimov's prose "need not be ashamed anywhere in literary society".

Although he prided himself on his unornamented prose style (for which he credited Clifford D. Simak as an early influence), Asimov also enjoyed giving his longer stories complicated narrative structures, often by arranging chapters in non-chronological ways. Some readers have been put off by this, complaining that the nonlinearity is not worth the trouble and adversely affects the clarity of the story. For example, the first third of The Gods Themselves begins with Chapter 6, then backtracks to fill in earlier material.^[55] (John Campbell advised Asimov to begin his stories as late in the plot as possible. This advice helped Asimov create "Reason", one of the early Robot stories. See In Memory Yet Green for details of that time period.) Patrouch found that the interwoven and nested flashbacks of The Currents of Space did serious harm to that novel, to such an extent that only a "dyed-in-the-kyrt^[56] Asimov fan" could enjoy it. Asimov's tendency to contort his timelines is perhaps most apparent in his later novel Nemesis, in which one group of characters live in the "present" and another group starts in the "past", beginning fifteen years earlier and gradually moving toward the time period of the first group.

Limitations[link]

Alien life

Asimov was also criticized for the general absence of sexuality and of extraterrestrial life in his science fiction. Asimov once explained that his reluctance to write about aliens came from an incident early in his career when Astounding's editor John Campbell rejected one of his science fiction stories because the alien characters were portrayed as superior to the humans. He decided that, rather than write weak alien characters, he would not write about aliens at all. Nevertheless, in response to these criticisms he wrote The Gods Themselves, which contains aliens, sex, and alien sex. The book won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1972,^[48] and the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1973.^[49] Asimov said that of all his writings, he was most proud of the middle section of The Gods Themselves, the part that deals with those themes.^[57]

In the Hugo Award-winning novella Gold, Asimov describes an author clearly based on himself who has one of his books (The Gods Themselves) adapted into a "compu-drama", essentially photo-realistic computer animation. The director criticizes the fictionalized Asimov ("Gregory Laborian") for having an extremely nonvisual style making it difficult to adapt his work, and the author explains that he relies on ideas and dialogue rather than description to get his points across.

Gender and social issues

Others have criticized him for a lack of strong female characters in his early work. In his autobiographical writings, such as Gold ("Women and Science Fiction"), he acknowledges this and responds by pointing to inexperience. His later novels, written with more female characters but in essentially the same prose style as his early SF stories, brought this matter to a wider audience. For example, the August 25, 1985 Washington Post's "Book World" section reports of Robots and Empire as follows:^{[citation needed]}

In 1940, Asimov's humans were stripped-down masculine portraits of Americans from 1940, and they still are. His robots were tin cans with speedlines like an old Studebaker, and still are; the Robot tales depended on an increasingly unworkable distinction between movable and unmovable artificial intelligences, and still do. In the Asimov universe, because it was conceived a long time ago, and because its author abhors confusion, there are no computers whose impact is worth noting, no social complexities, no genetic engineering, aliens, arcologies, multiverses, clones, sin or sex; his heroes (in this case R. Daneel Olivaw, whom we first met as the robot protagonist of The Caves of Steel and its sequels) feel no pressure of information, raw or cooked, as the simplest of us do today; they suffer no deformation from the winds of the Asimov future, because it is so deeply and strikingly orderly.

It may be noted, however, that in fact The Naked Sun (1957) deals with social issues as a core part of its central setting and motivation, depicts genetic engineering in the guise of eugenics as a fundamental part of that society, presents the reader with inverted arcologies where a single person is the focal point of the artificial environment as well as a hero who hails from a "normal" arcology on Earth. Meanwhile, totally artificial birth, although not specifically cloning, is the aim of the leaders of the society, sexual want is the major driving force of the main female character (albeit veiled in 1950s sensibilities), and the entire story is used to make the point that too much order is ultimately a stagnant dead end to be avoided.^{[citation needed]}

Views[link]

Religion[link]

Isaac Asimov was an atheist, a humanist, and a rationalist.^[58] He did not oppose religious conviction in others, but he frequently railed against superstitious and pseudoscientific beliefs that tried to pass themselves off as genuine science. During his childhood, his father and mother observed Orthodox Jewish traditions, though not as stringently as they had in Petrovichi; they did not, however, force their beliefs upon young Isaac. Thus he grew up without strong religious influences, coming to believe that the Torah represented Hebrew mythology in the same way that the Iliad recorded Greek mythology. As his books Treasury of Humor and Asimov Laughs Again record, Asimov was willing to tell jokes involving God, Satan, the Garden of Eden, Jerusalem, and other religious topics, expressing the viewpoint that a good joke can do more to provoke thought than hours of philosophical discussion.

For a brief while, his father worked in the local synagogue to enjoy the familiar surroundings and, as Isaac put it, "shine as a learned scholar"^[59] versed in the sacred writings. This scholarship was a seed for his later authorship and publication of Asimov's Guide to the Bible, an analysis of the historic foundations for both Old and New Testaments. For many years, Asimov called himself an atheist; however, he considered the term somewhat inadequate, as it described what he did not believe rather than what he did. Eventually, he described himself as a "humanist" and considered that term more practical. He did however continue to identify himself as a non-observant Jew^[60] as stated in his introduction to Jack Dann's anthology of Jewish science fiction, Wandering Stars: "I attend no services and follow no ritual and have never undergone that curious puberty rite, the bar mitzvah. It doesn't matter. I am Jewish."

In his last volume of autobiography, Asimov wrote, "If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul."^[61] The same memoir states his belief that Hell is "the drooling dream of a sadist" crudely affixed to an all-merciful God; if even human governments were willing to curtail cruel and unusual punishments, wondered Asimov, why would punishment in the afterlife not be restricted to a limited term? Asimov rejected the idea that a human belief or action could merit infinite punishment. If an afterlife existed, he claimed, the longest and most severe punishment would be reserved for those who "slandered God by inventing Hell".^[62]

Politics[link]

Asimov became a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party during the New Deal, and thereafter remained a political liberal. He was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War in the 1960s and in a television interview during the early 1970s he publicly endorsed George McGovern. He was unhappy about what he considered an "irrationalist" viewpoint taken by many radical political activists from the late 1960s and onwards. In his second volume of autobiography, In Joy Still Felt, Asimov recalled meeting the counterculture figure Abbie Hoffman; Asimov's impression was that the 1960s' counterculture heroes had ridden an emotional wave which, in the end, left them stranded in a "no-man's land of the spirit" from which he wondered if they would ever return.

He vehemently opposed Richard Nixon, considering him "a crook and a liar". He followed the unfolding events of Watergate day-to-day, and was pleased when the president was forced to resign. He was dismayed over the pardon extended to Nixon by his successor: "I was not impressed by the argument that it has spared the nation an ordeal. To my way of thinking, the ordeal was necessary to make certain it would never happen again."

Social issues[link]

Asimov considered himself a feminist even before Women's Liberation became a widespread movement; he joked that he wished women to be free "because I hate it when they charge".^[63] More seriously, he argued that the issue of women's rights was closely connected to that of population control. Furthermore, he believed that homosexuality must be considered a "moral right" on population grounds, as must all consenting adult sexual activity that does not lead to reproduction.^[64] He issued many appeals for population control, reflecting a perspective articulated by people from Thomas Malthus through Paul R. Ehrlich.^{[citation needed]}

Environmental issues[link]

Asimov's defense of civil applications of nuclear power even after the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant incident damaged his relations with some of his fellow liberals. In a letter reprinted in Yours, Isaac Asimov,^[64] he states that although he would prefer living in "no danger whatsoever" than near a nuclear reactor, he would still prefer a home near a nuclear power plant than in a slum on Love Canal or near "a Union Carbide plant producing methyl isocyanate" (referring to the Bhopal disaster).

In the closing years of his life, Asimov blamed the deterioration of the quality of life that he perceived in New York City on the shrinking tax base caused by the middle-class flight to the suburbs. His last non-fiction book, Our Angry Earth (1991, co-written with his long-time friend science fiction author Frederik Pohl), deals with elements of the environmental crisis such as global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer.

Other authors[link]

Asimov stated, both in his autobiography and in several essays, that he enjoyed the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien. He paid tribute to The Lord of the Rings in a "Black Widowers" story. (In his letter to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, who had previously interviewed him for Daily Telegraph Magazine, Tolkien said that he enjoyed the science fiction of Isaac Asimov.)

He admired a number of his contemporaries, in particular fellow science-fiction author and science writer Arthur C. Clarke, with whom he entered into the lighthearted "Treaty of Park Avenue," which stipulated that Clarke was free to refer to himself as the best science fiction writer in the world (Asimov being second-best), provided he admitted that Asimov was the best science writer in the world (Clarke being second-best). He freely acknowledged a number of his fellow writers as superior to himself in talent, saying of Harlan Ellison, "He is (in my opinion) one of the best writers in the world, far more skilled at the art than I am."

Influence[link]

Paul Krugman, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, has stated that it was Asimov's concept of psychohistory that inspired him to become an economist.^[65]

John Jenkins, who has reviewed the vast majority of Asimov's written output, once observed:

It has been pointed out that most science fiction writers since the 1950s have been affected by Asimov, either modeling their style on his or deliberately avoiding anything like his style.^{[66][unreliable source?]}

Television and film appearances[link]

This section requires expansion.

• "To Tell The Truth", CBS, approximately 1968, playing the "real" Isaac Asimov. Only one panel member guessed correctly, on the grounds that Asimov wore glasses and somebody writing so many books would have to wear glasses.
• The Nature of Things 1969
• "ABC News" coverage of Apollo 11, 1969, with Fred Pohl, interviewed by Rod Serling
• "David Frost" interview program, August 1969. This is the show in which Frost asked Asimov if he had ever tried to find God and, after some initial evasion, Asimov answered, "God is much more intelligent than I—let him try to find me."
• The Dick Cavett Show 1970
• Target... Earth? 1980
• NBC TV, 1982 "Speaking Freely" interviewed by Edwin Newman 1982
• ARTS Network talk show hosted by Studs Terkel and Calvin Trillin, approximately 1982. Other guests included Harlan Ellison and James Gunn. Asimov noted, during this interview, that science fiction wasn't necessarily predictive - pointing out that while writers did stories about going to the moon, and stories about television, not one wrote a story where men went to the moon while people at home watched on television.^{[citation needed]}
• Oltre New York 1986
• Voyage to the Outer Planets and Beyond 1986
• Bill Moyers interview 1988^[67]
• Stranieri in America 1988

Selected bibliography[link]

Including all titles, charts, and edited collections, there are currently 515 items in Asimov's bibliography—not counting his individual short stories, individual essays, and criticism. For his 100th, 200th, and 300th books (based on his personal count), Asimov published Opus 100 (1969), Opus 200 (1979), and Opus 300 (1984), celebrating his writing; he did not choose to do this for his 400th book, however. Asimov's writings span all major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification except for Philosophy. However, if his foreword for The Humanist Way is included, he has been published in all categories.^[3]

According to UNESCO's Index Translationum database, Asimov is the world's 17th most-translated author, just behind Arthur Conan Doyle and ahead of Pope John Paul II.^[68]

There is an online exhibit displaying features, visuals, and descriptions of some of the over 600 books, games, audio recordings, videos, and wall charts included in the West Virginia University Libraries’ virtually complete Asimov Collection. Many first, rare, and autographed editions are in the Libraries’ Rare Book Room. Book jackets and autographs are presented online along with descriptions and images of children’s books, science fiction art, multimedia, and other materials in the collection.^[69]

For a listing of Asimov's books in chronological order within his future history, see the Foundation series list of books.

Science fiction[link]

"Greater Foundation" series[link]

The Robot series was originally separate from the Foundation series. The Galactic Empire novels were originally published as independent stories. Later in life, Asimov synthesized them into a single coherent 'history' that appeared in the extension of the Foundation series.

• The Robot series:
  • The Caves of Steel. 1954. ISBN 0-553-29340-0.  (first Elijah Baley SF-crime novel)
  • The Naked Sun. 1957. ISBN 0-553-29339-7.  (second Elijah Baley SF-crime novel)
  • The Robots of Dawn. 1983. ISBN 0-553-29949-2.  (third Elijah Baley SF-crime novel)
  • Robots and Empire. 1985. ISBN 978-0-586-06200-5.  (sequel to the Elijah Baley trilogy)

• Galactic Empire novels:
  • Pebble in the Sky. 1950. ISBN 0-553-29342-7. 
  • The Stars, Like Dust. 1951. ISBN 0-553-29343-5. 
  • The Currents of Space. 1952. ISBN 0-553-29341-9. 

• Original Foundation trilogy:
  • Foundation. 1951. ISBN 0-553-29335-4. 
  • Foundation and Empire. 1952. ISBN 0-553-29337-0. , Published with the title 'The Man Who Upset the Universe' as a 35c Ace paperback, D-125, in about 1952
  • Second Foundation. 1953. ISBN 0-553-29336-2. 

• Extended Foundation series:
  • Foundation's Edge. 1982. ISBN 0-553-29338-9. 
  • Foundation and Earth. 1986. ISBN 0-553-58757-9.  (last of the Foundation series)
  • Prelude to Foundation. 1988. ISBN 0-553-27839-8.  (occurs before "Foundation")
  • Forward the Foundation. 1993. ISBN 0-553-40488-1.  (occurs after "Prelude to Foundation" and before "Foundation")

Lucky Starr series (as Paul French)[link]

• David Starr, Space Ranger (1952)
• Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids (1953)
• Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus (1954)
• Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury (1956)
• Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter (1957)
• Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn (1958)

Norby Chronicles (with Janet Asimov)[link]

• Norby, the Mixed-Up Robot (1983)
• Norby's Other Secret (1984)
• Norby and the Lost Princess (1985)
• Norby and the Invaders (1985)
• Norby and the Queen's Necklace (1986)
• Norby Finds a Villain (1987)
• Norby Down to Earth (1988)
• Norby and Yobo's Great Adventure (1989)
• Norby and the Oldest Dragon (1990)
• Norby and the Court Jester (1991)

Novels not part of a series[link]

Novels marked with an asterisk * have minor connections to the Foundation series.

• The End of Eternity (1955) *
• Fantastic Voyage (1966) (a novelization of the movie)
• The Gods Themselves (1972)
• Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain (1987) (not a sequel to Fantastic Voyage, but a similar, independent story)
• Nemesis (1989) *
• Nightfall (1990), with Robert Silverberg (short story written by Asimov, novelized by Silverberg)
• The Ugly Little Boy (1992), with Robert Silverberg (aka: Child of Time) (short story written by Asimov, novelized by Silverberg)
• The Positronic Man (1993) *, with Robert Silverberg

Short story collections[link]

See also List of short stories by Isaac Asimov

• I, Robot. 1950. ISBN 0-553-29438-5. 
• The Martian Way and Other Stories. 1955. ISBN 0-8376-0463-X. 
• Earth Is Room Enough. 1957. ISBN 0-449-24125-4. 
• Nine Tomorrows. 1959. ISBN 0-449-24084-3. 
• The Rest of the Robots. 1964. ISBN 0-385-09041-2. 
• Through a Glass, Clearly. 1967. ISBN 0-86025-124-1. 
• Nightfall and Other Stories. 1969. ISBN 0-449-01969-1. 
• The Early Asimov. 1972. ISBN 0-449-02850-X. 
• The Best of Isaac Asimov. 1973. ISBN 0-7221-1256-4. 
• Buy Jupiter and Other Stories. 1975. ISBN 0-385-05077-1. 
• The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories. 1976. ISBN 0-575-02240-X. 
• The Complete Robot. 1982. 
• The Winds of Change and Other Stories. 1983. ISBN 0-385-18099-3. 
• The Alternate Asimovs. 1986. ISBN 0-385-19784-5. 
• The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov. 1986. 
• Robot Dreams. 1986. ISBN 0-441-73154-6. 
• Azazel. 1988. 
• Robot Visions. 1990. ISBN 0-451-45064-7. 
• Gold. 1995. ISBN 0-553-28339-1. 
• Magic. 1996. ISBN 0-00-224622-8. 

Mysteries[link]

Novels[link]

• The Death Dealers (1958), republished as A Whiff of Death
• Murder at the ABA (1976), also published as Authorized Murder

Short story collections[link]

[edit] Black Widowers series

• Tales of the Black Widowers (1974)
• More Tales of the Black Widowers (1976)
• Casebook of the Black Widowers (1980)
• Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984)
• Puzzles of the Black Widowers (1990)
• The Return of the Black Widowers (2003)

Other mysteries[link]

• Asimov's Mysteries (1968)
• The Key Word and Other Mysteries (1977)
• The Union Club Mysteries (1983)
• The Disappearing Man and Other Mysteries (1985)
• The Best Mysteries of Isaac Asimov (1986)
• The Feeling of Power (1967)

Nonfiction[link]

Popular science[link]

Collections of Asimov's essays — originally published as monthly columns in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

1. Fact and Fancy (1962)
2. View from a Height (1963)
3. Adding a Dimension (1964)
4. Of Time, Space, & Other Things (1965)
5. From Earth to Heaven (1966)
6. Science, Numbers and I (1968)
7. The Solar System and Back (1970)
8. The Stars in Their Courses (1971)
9. The Left Hand of the Electron (1972)
10. The Tragedy of the Moon (1973)
11. Of Matters Great & Small (1975)
12. The Planet that Wasn't (1976)
13. Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright (1977)
14. Road to Infinity (1979)
15. The Sun Shines Bright (1981)
16. Counting the Eons (1983)
17. X Stands for Unknown (1984)
18. The Subatomic Monster (1985)
19. Far as Human Eye Could See (1987)
20. The Relativity of Wrong (1988)
21. Out of the Everywhere (1990)
22. The Secret of the Universe (1990)

Other science books by Asimov

• The Chemicals of Life (1954) ISBN 978-0-451-62418-5
• Inside the Atom (1956) ISBN 978-0-200-71444-0
• Only a Trillion (1957) ISBN 978-0-441-63121-6
• Building Blocks of the Universe (1957; revised 1974) ISBN 0-200-71099-0 ISBN 978-0200710992
• The World of Carbon (1958) ISBN 978-0-02-091350-4
• The World of Nitrogen (1958) ISBN 978-0-02-091400-6
• Words of Science and the History Behind Them (1959) ISBN 978-0-395-06571-6
• The Clock We Live On (1959) ISBN 978-0-200-71100-5
• Asimov on Numbers (1959) ISBN 978-0-517-37145-9
• The Wellsprings of Life (1960) ISBN 978-0-451-03245-4
• Life and Energy (1962) ISBN 978-0-380-00942-8
• The Human Body: Its Structure and Operation (1963) ISBN 978-0-451-02430-5, ISBN 978-0-451-62707-0 (revised)
• The Human Brain: Its Capacities and Functions (1963) ISBN 978-0-451-62867-1
• Planets for Man (with Stephen H. Dole) (1964, reprinted by RAND 2007) ISBN 978-0-8330-4226-2 [1]
• The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science (1965)
  • The title varied with each of the four editions, the last being Asimov's New Guide to Science (1984) ISBN 978-0-14-017213-3
• The Universe: From Flat Earth to Quasar (1966) ISBN 978-0-380-01596-2
• The Neutrino (1966) ASIN B002JK525W
• Is Anyone There? (1967), ISBN 0-385-08401-3 – where he used the term Spome
• Photosynthesis (1968) ISBN 978-0-465-05703-0
• Our World in Space (1974) ISBN 978-0-8212-0434-4
• Please Explain (1975) ISBN 978-0-440-96804-7
• Asimov On Astronomy (1975) ISBN 978-0-517-27924-3
• Asimov On Physics (1976) ISBN 978-0-385-00958-4
• The Collapsing Universe (1977), ISBN 0-671-81738-8
• Extraterrestrial Civilizations (1979) ISBN 978-0-449-90020-8
• Visions of the Universe with coauthor Kazuaki Iwasaki (1981) ISBN 978-0-939540-01-3
• Exploring the Earth and the Cosmos (1982) ISBN 978-0-517-54667-3
• Understanding Physics (1988) [1966] ISBN 978-0-88029-251-1
  • Vol. I, Motion, Sound, and Heat ISBN 978-0-451-00329-4
  • Vol. II, Light, Magnetism, and Electricity ISBN 978-0-451-61942-6
  • Vol. III, The Electron, Proton, and Neutron ISBN 978-0-451-62634-9
• Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery (1989), second edition adds content thru 1993, ISBN 978-0-06-270113-8
• Asimov's Chronology of the World (1991) ISBN 978-0-06-270036-0
• Isaac Asimov's Guide to Earth and Space (1991) ISBN 978-0-449-22059-7
• Atom: Journey Across the Subatomic Cosmos (1991) ISBN 978-1-4395-0900-5
• Mysteries of deep space: Quasars, Pulsars and Black Holes (1994) ISBN 978-0-8368-1133-9
• The Moon (2003), revised by Richard Hantula ISBN 978-1-59102-122-3
• The Sun (2003), revised by Richard Hantula ISBN 978-1-59102-122-3
• Jupiter (2004), revised by Richard Hantula ISBN 978-1-59102-123-0
• The Earth (2004), revised by Richard Hantula ISBN 978-1-59102-177-3
• Venus (2004), revised by Richard Hantula ISBN 978-0-8368-3877-0

Annotations[link]

• Asimov's Annotated "Don Juan"
• Asimov's Annotated "Paradise Lost"
• Asimov's Annotated "Gilbert and Sullivan"
• Asimov's The Annotated "Gulliver's Travels"
• Familiar Poems, Annotated

Guides[link]

• Asimov's Guide to the Bible, vols I and II (1981), ISBN 0-517-34582-X
• Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare, vols I and II (1970), ISBN 0-517-26825-6

Autobiography[link]

• In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920–1954, (1979, Doubleday)
• In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954–1978, (1980, Doubleday)
• I. Asimov: A Memoir, (1994, Doubleday)
  • It's Been a Good Life, (2002), condensation of Asimov's three volume biography by his widow, Janet Jeppson Asimov

Other nonfiction[link]

• Opus 100 (1969), ISBN 0-395-07351-0
• Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor (1971)
• The Sensuous Dirty Old Man (1971), ISBN 0-451-07199-9
• Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (1972), ISBN 0-385-17771-2
• Lecherous Limericks (1976), ISBN 0-449-22841-X
• More Lecherous Limericks (1976), ISBN 0-8027-7102-5
• Still More Lecherous Limericks (1977), ISBN 0-8027-7106-8
• Opus 200 (1979), ISBN 0-395-27625-X
• Our Federal Union (1975), ISBN 0-395-2283-3
• Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts (1979), ISBN 0-517-36111-6
• A Grossery of Limericks, with John Ciardi (1981), ISBN 0-393-33112-1
• The Roving Mind (1983) (collection of essays). New edition published by Prometheus Books, 1997, ISBN 1-57392-181-5
• Opus 300 (1984), ISBN 0-395-36108-7
• Limericks, Two Gross, with John Ciardi (1985), ISBN 0-393-04530-7
• Asimov Laughs Again (1992)

Selected Books by Dewey Decimal Category[link]

• Hallucination Orbit: Psychology In Science Fiction, (000)
• Asimov's Guide to the Bible, (200)
• Why are the Rain Forests Vanishing?, (300)
• Words from History, (400)
• Realm of Numbers, (500)
• The Human Body: Its Structure and Operation, (600)
• Visions of the Universe, (700)
• The Do-It-Yourself Bestseller: A Workbook, (800)
• The Greeks: A Great Adventure, (900)

References[link]